Page 11 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember ix

Author Preface

San Francisco’s Golden Age
The Titanic 1970s
The First Decade of Gay Liberation
(Stonewall to HIV)
1970-1982

“Bliss was it that dawn to be alive,
but to be young was heaven.”
—William Wordsworth, The Prelude

“Whoever did not live in the years
neighboring the revolution
does not know what the pleasure of living means.”
—Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

This memoir-novel is a literary structure akin to independent film. Dia-
logue rules. Time is folded. Characters drive the plot. A voice-over guides
nuance. The chapters are reels. The first sentence outlines the entire story.
Scenes are numbered for shooting. Drama collides with humor. Beauty
slips on a banana peel. The narrator, Magnus Bishop, is auteur directing
the mise en scene—which is everything that appears on the page to aid the
reader willing to time-travel to the past.
The narrator’s point of view gives camera angles on characters, crowds,
streets, cafes, galleries, bars, baths, clothing, furnishings, and rituals of
sex and magic. His camera eye tracks through large and small scenes in
medium shots and close-ups. The boom mike mixes sounds of music,
voices, and flesh. The editing technique is collage, juxtaposition, re-vision,
deconstruction, and double-exposure of dozens of texts real within the
fictive world of the memoir.
Threading pop culture from John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy (news-
paper headlines, newsreel films, journals) to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone
with the Wind (the O’Hara clan; Hollywood heroines’ man trouble) and
Andy Warhol’s film The Chelsea Girls (twelve stories running four hours
simultaneously on two screens), this “screenplay novel” purposely requires
twelve hours of reading to reveal twelve years of history. For those who
enjoy curling up with a book, such a layered story, such a longer-form
novel, going wide and deep can be an absorbing journey out of oneself
into otherness.
©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK